


Dame Malati of the Third Realm

by Dunnrulestheworld



Category: Original Work
Genre: My OCs, Other, Really useless knight, fairy tale, my original story, princess who rejects gender roles and wants to be a knight
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-13
Updated: 2016-05-13
Packaged: 2018-06-08 03:09:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,138
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6836584
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dunnrulestheworld/pseuds/Dunnrulestheworld
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Malati is a princess who wants nothing more than to become a knight. But will her parents allow it?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dame Malati of the Third Realm

She told her mother she didn’t need this. She didn’t need protecting. She’d been practicing with a sword for some time now, so she could handle herself. A few months ago, she started looking at the knights that her mother and father had sent to protect her. She had watched them day after day, noting every movement they made as they practiced to keep sharp. She’d convinced a young blacksmith to make her a lavish sword, telling him it was for a new knight being inducted. He’d obliged, fashioning a blade adorned with silver and gold, perfectly balanced, with gentle, flowing curves in the edge. She covered at home by telling her mother it was dulled and just for show. She believed her, but her mother had always been easy to fool.

In her room, she spun her sword in graceful swings as she’d seen the young knights do. She used her tailor’s dress model as a dummy, when she wasn’t working on a dress, or course. She took a dark colored slip and slit the skirt up the sides, claiming to her mother that it was just for riding. She told her mother a lot of things that weren’t quite true. 

She came upon a roadblock a couple months into training herself. She had simply learned everything she could observe. There was no way she could keep her knightly wishes to herself any longer. So she took her parents aside one evening and told them she wanted to become a knight.

“I already have just about everything I need,” she said, “I mean, I don’t have chainmail but I have my archery armor, that would be good to start with right? I even have a sword!”  

She tried to explain her stance on the matter in the best way possible, but the farther she got into her story, the harder their faces became. 

“Malati, no. You are a princess. You need to do your schoolwork. You need to become an  educated, effeminate, queen.”

“Mother, I can be educated, effeminate,  _ and _ a knight! I’ve already nearly finished my studies, I still wear dresses all the time, and I’ve been practicing sword fighting! I can do all three I swear!”

“Malati. You heard me. I said no, that’s final.”

Her father sat quietly, but didn’t look particularly comfortable with the conversation. Malati didn’t really care that her mother was mad. She knew what she wanted, and she wasn’t going to let her standards for who she should be get in her way. But, to punish her, they never let her go anywhere without at least three professionally trained knights more than two feet away from her.

She began to get good at chasing them away from her. she was able to get many to quit their posts just by complaining about her period. Boys are so squeamish. But there was one knight that she couldn’t frighten away. His name was Tate, and he was a conventionally attractive, creamy skinned, blonde haired dope. It seemed like he wanted to be a knight just as badly as her, but for different reasons. He didn’t exactly try to protect her, but he seemed like he needed this job.

One day, they had to make a trek through the woods. It sounds really cliché, she knows, but her parents had to have a diplomatic meeting with the next country over, and she was to follow them out a week later for the festivities. So she dressed herself in her makeshift knight’s garb (“It just makes it easier to ride a horse”), strapped her sword to her belt (“It’s just for show. Who’ll mess with us if we’re armed?”), and packed her bags for the trip.

So they were making their way through the woods, when bandits came across the two of them. Tate froze up, stopping his horse, then barely moving. The bandits had heard of their little excursion and wanted one of two things: either any gold and jewels she had on hand, or her. Tate gaped like a fish. Malati rolled her eyes and thought fast. She had her sword. she dismounted her horse and made her way to the bandits. She told them the same lie she’d been telling everyone, that she had this sword, dulled for show, but still made of the most ornate and priceless materials. They, of course, practically drooled over the blade and asked her to unsheath it.

She did, slowly, watching the shine on the edge. When the sheath was nearly off, she flicked the sword into the open, sliding into her fighting stance, completely catching the bandits off guard. she struck them down one by one, slashing non-fatal wounds into their flesh, and bashing them unconscious with the hilt. She stood over their bleeding bodies for a moment, breathing heavily, in awe of what she’d just accomplished. Tate expressed his wonder at the gore in front of him. He told her he could never do that in his life. She wondered why he had become a knight in the first place, if he couldn’t even protect anyone in a fight.

She suggested they should get moving, and that they could talk on the way to meet her parents. 

“I’m doing this for my parents,” Tate said suddenly, as they were riding through the last sections of the trail. “they wanted me to bring some kind of respect to our family and our little town.”

“Well if it helps, that’s kind of the reason I’m doing it. Respect. I want to be seen as a person, not just a pretty thing to be carted off to balls and betrothals. Besides, swinging a sword around is fun.”

“I haven’t really had the chance to ‘swing a sword around’ as you put it.”

“Then how did you actually become a knight?”

“I don’t know really. I’m a guy who was interested I guess.”

When they finally caught up with her parents, they explained what had happened in the woods. Her parents were impressed but still hesitated to properly call her a knight.

“Oh come on,” Malati complained. “If you can let him,” she gestured at Tate, “be a knight, surely you can let me. I know more about fighting than he does.”

“It’s true,” Tate spoke up. “I know nothing. I just wanted to be a knight for my parents’ sake, and they didn’t even test me, just set me as a squire and I was knighted when I accidentally stabbed a guy and saved my master.” The king and queen seemed taken aback by those particular facts. They looked at each other in quiet consideration.

In the end, she was knighted and became Dame Malati of the Third Realm, and she trained Tate to be a proper knight, after learning more from a master knight herself.


End file.
